Archive for the ‘WORLDBUILDING’ Category

Everybody already knows what Hemingway said: all writers need a good bullshit detector. But what if I told you that all your characters needed good bullshit detectors too? Okay, maybe that’s overstating things. Some characters need to be dense, always catching on last. Terry Bisson even wrote that it may help to make your POV […]

Yesterday at SpecTechnique we looked at cases when a cliche is deformed or expanded. When you’re going into a deformed cliche, you think you’ve seen this line before. Then when the cliche flips around on you, you’re taken by surprise. This is a technique writers can use to breach their readers’ defenses. Today we’re leaving […]

One part of creating a secondary world is working out a culture for that world: its songs, stories, plot devices and cliches; its holy books and its vocabulary of affect; how it represents and celebrates and criticizes itself. One method of doing this is to build primary sources into your secondary world. I’m talking about […]